Reblogged:Good Riddance

[Gus Van Horn blog]

Over the weekend I learned that Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, died in federal prison.

Good riddance.

Unfortunately, as the obituary makes apparent, the evil, nihilistic ideas that animated him are alive and well:

[P]olitical change and the passage of time caused some to see Mr. Kaczynski in a new light. His manifesto accorded centrality to a healthy environment without mentioning global warming; it warned about the dangers of people becoming "dependent" on technology while making scant reference to the internet. To young people afflicted by social media anomie and fearful of climate doom, Mr. Kaczynski seemed to wield a predictive power that outstripped the evidence available to him.

In 2017 and 2020, Netflix released documentaries about him. He maintained postal correspondence with thousands of people -- journalists, students and die-hard supporters. In 2018, Wired magazine announced "the Unabomber's odd and furious online revival," and New York magazine called him "an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes."

These "acolytes," exemplified by the likes of Greta Thunberg, are working towards the same end, whether they admit it or not, of destroying Western civilization -- which depends on technology and reliable sources of energy, and will die without them.

Worse, there are armies of conventional people who, reading this, might think something like, He was evil, but he had a point. That is because the article -- like I imagine many others will -- does not connect or deliberately evades the causal connection between Theodore Kaczynski's ideas and his actions.

Toward that end, it is worth remembering the words of the late John Lewis regarding Kaczynski and his brothers-in-spirit:

Image by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Morally there is no difference between an environmentalist who bans DDT at the price of millions of malaria deaths, the Unabomber who selects his victims personally, the anarchist who smashes store windows and dreams of smashing structural steel, and a terrorist who rides a passenger plane into the World Trade Center. Each glories in destruction for its own sake, and each advocates death as the epitome of that destruction. It is no accident that they are all defined in terms of "anti-something." Nothing is the aim, and the goal, of all of them. They are brothers-in-arms. Now you see the scope of the battle that America faces.

It is no comfort that an evil man has finally expired when there are so many people ready to continue his work -- thanks to the widespread acceptance of the very conventional, incorrect, and evil attitudes about Western civilization Kaczynski held.

The only comfort is that there is a way to fight back -- by learning and advocating better ideas.

In a better age, we would not read an obituary speak approvingly of a barbaric murderer inspiring acolytes. Let us work for that better age now.

-- CAV

Link to Original

[tadmjones]

Fun fact Kaczynski was a subject of the mind control experiments dubbed the MK Ultra program.

[Jon Letendre]

9 hours ago, tadmjones said:

Fun fact Kaczynski was a subject of the mind control experiments dubbed the MK Ultra program.

That's true and it suggests his "victims" were likely the same monsters who tortured him, subjected him to trauma-based mind control and wiped his original person from existence. Shame he didn't get more of them.

[InfraBeat]

21 hours ago, Gus Van Horn blog said:

exemplified by the likes of Greta Thunberg

What is the basis for claiming that Thunberg is a follower of Kaczinski?

21 hours ago, Gus Van Horn blog said:

working towards the same end, whether they admit it or not, of destroying Western civilization

That depends on whether those people believe that what they advocate will destroy Western civilization. If they don't believe that what they advocate will destroy Western civilization then we can't infer that that is their goal. In particular, does Thunberg believe that carrying out her agenda will destroy Western civilization?

21 hours ago, Gus Van Horn blog said:

Quote from a writer:

"Morally there is no difference between an environmentalist who bans DDT at the price of millions of malaria deaths, the Unabomber who selects his victims personally, the anarchist who smashes store windows and dreams of smashing structural steel, and a terrorist who rides a passenger plane into the World Trade Center." 

That takes some unpacking (especially the DDT issue), but, at least to start: (1) Smashing windows is not morally equivalent with murdering targeted people nor killing people en mass. That assertion of equivalency is preposterous. (2) Wishing to smash structural steel is not morally equivalent with murdering targeted people nor killing people en mass. That assertion of equivalency is preposterous. 

21 hours ago, Gus Van Horn blog said:

an obituary speak approvingly of a barbaric murderer inspiring acolytes

(1) The passages you quoted don't state approval. (2) The passages do not say that those people aspire to murder.

Edited June 13, 2023 by InfraBeat

[Dupin]

18 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

That's true and it suggests his "victims" were likely the same monsters who tortured him, subjected him to trauma-based mind control and wiped his original person from existence. Shame he didn't get more of them.

How does it suggest that?  (I agree that if his victims were among the perpetrators of MKUltra then they deserved what they got.)

[Jon Letendre]

3 hours ago, Dupin said:

How does it suggest that?

For one, he was mailing bombs to people for decades without a peep from him regarding motivation. That was a big part of what animated the story during those decades: not just that no one knew who was doing it, but that no one knew the motivation. No one could explain why the particular victims were selected. From my recollection of those decades no one ever suggested it was a general attack against technocracy (as we were later told was his motivation all along). It didn't look like that and no one thought that. He was a literal genius, so definitely smart enough to understand that all of that bombing effort and risk could do nothing toward fighting technocracy if the public didn't make that connection.

Those decades of behavior are not consistent with a motivation to change the world by punishing people for promoting technology, but they were consistent with resolving a personal matter.

[InfraBeat]

Is it safe to say that one can be both extremely intelligent and extremely irrational? Kaczyinski could have been so irrational that he believed his crimes would advance his cause.

And the list of victims doesn't seem to be a list of people likely to have been working for the experiments. One of the victims was about four years old when Kaczyinski underwent the experiments. And on a list of victims, nine don't have web links to look them up, and bombs were defused in two cases, so there there could very well be more victims and intended victims that can be ruled out, even by age alone, as working for the the experiments. Also, a bomb exploded in the luggage compartment of an airplane. So if Kaczynski meant to target an experimenter, he would have needed to know that the experimenter was on the flight. And a bomb left in a parking lot. And the head of the program was not targeted. 

By the way, how much is known about Kaczinski's experiences in the program? Is it known how harsh they were?

Edited June 14, 2023 by InfraBeat

[Dupin]

InfraBeat makes some good points.  Also ...

A theory being consistent with the facts by itself hardly suggests that the theory is true – or anyway only to an infinitesimal degree.  It is no reason to place Kaczynski on the moral high ground.

By the way, from reading a few articles about Kaczynski he doesn’t impress me as a genius.  It’s a common mistake among non-mathematicians to think that a mathematician must be a genius.

 

[Jon Letendre]

2 hours ago, InfraBeat said:

Is it safe to say that one can be both extremely intelligent and extremely irrational? Kaczyinski could have been so irrational that he believed his crimes would advance his cause.

And the list of victims doesn't seem to be a list of people likely to have been working for the experiments. One of the victims was about four years old when Kaczyinski underwent the experiments. And on a list of victims, nine don't have web links to look them up, and bombs were defused in two cases, so there there could very well be more victims and intended victims that can be ruled out, even by age alone, as working for the the experiments. Also, a bomb exploded in the luggage compartment of an airplane. So if Kaczynski meant to target an experimenter, he would have needed to know that the experimenter was on the flight. And a bomb left in a parking lot. And the head of the program was not targeted. 

By the way, how much is known about Kaczinski's experiences in the program? Is it known how harsh they were?

Several victims were not intended but were assistants to the targeted party.

Yes, there could very well be many more victims. CIA may have understood very early that an MK victim was mailing the bombs, based on the victims selected. The motivation to sweep his hits against perps under the rug would have been very strong as they would want the case understood as one crazy man unconnected to anything else.

You don't know that he didn't target the program director. You know that there is no public information about the director being targeted.

Trauma-based MK Ultra mind control is brutally inhumane. I've read up on the program a little bit. It involves inflicting unbearable pain and abuse until the victim dissociates from the experience and the core personality shatters, whereupon new personalities (plural) may be programmed in. Of course, the mainstream reports are that he was merely "interviewed intensely," yelled at, "challenged."

[Jon Letendre]

2 hours ago, Dupin said:

By the way, from reading a few articles about Kaczynski he doesn’t impress me as a genius.  It’s a common mistake among non-mathematicians to think that a mathematician must be a genius.

 

He tested 167 IQ in the 5th grade, was offered a full scholarship to Harvard at age 15 and landed a professorship at Berkeley at age 25.

[InfraBeat]

2 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

Several victims were not intended but were assistants to the targeted party.

(1) Assistants would tend to be even younger, thus less likely to be involved with the program. (2) What is your basis for claiming that assistants were targeted? (3) If I'm not mistaken, most or a good number of the packages were addressed to specific people who were not assistants. (4) How to account for packages not sent to specific people? (5) Why nothing sent to the head of the program?

(6) Most crucially, is there any victim or person around a victim who you have any basis for claiming that he was part of the program?

2 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

CIA may have understood very early that an MK victim was mailing the bombs, based on the victims selected.

Who? Which victims would the CIA have basis to know that they were part of the program?

2 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

You don't know that he didn't target the program director. You know that there is no public information about the director being targeted.

Then, by the same token: I don't know that Richard Nixon never attempted suicide. I only know that there's no public information about Richard Nixon once attempting suicide. 

Your reasoning is ridiculous.

2 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

I've read up on the program a little bit.

Where?

Anyway, how do you know that the experiments on different people didn't significantly range in harshness?

Weren't Ken Kesey, Robert Hunter and Allen Ginsburg subjects who took LSD and liked it? It doesn't seem to be a given that every subject was subjected to the worst treatment. Unless you have solid information, we don't know that Kaczyinski suffered severely.

 

 

Edited June 14, 2023 by InfraBeat

[InfraBeat]

Kaczinski said he killed in order to have his essay published and widely noticed:

"In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people."

It is possible that that was not really his purpose but that he's rationalizing his crimes. But not one bit of evidence has been given in this thread that his purpose was revenge for the Harvard experiment and not what he actually said it was, as everything we know goes against that explanation. So far, it's been mere baseless, arbitrary assertion - highly irrational. 

Edited June 14, 2023 by InfraBeat

[Reidy]

If the experiment was the cause of K’s later behavior, wouldn’t we expect the same behavior from all or most or a significant portion of the other subjects?

[tadmjones]

2 hours ago, Reidy said:

If the experiment was the cause of K’s later behavior, wouldn’t we expect the same behavior from all or most or a significant portion of the other subjects?

Like Manson or Jack Ruby?

[Jon Letendre]

I find that I am simply incapable of believing that three years of torture sessions with a sadomasochist starting at age 16 can possibly not have played a role. Others' mileage may vary.

I also don't believe he would spend decades targeting for death only people he didn't know, people guilty of "promoting technology," but never bother to target any of the people who personally stirred his brains for years.

 

“Subjects were incompletely informed about the nature of the experiment [and] were tricked, or coerced, into remaining in the experiment. Given that the procedures were designed to ‘break’ enemy agents and render them so damaged that they would be operationally useless, it is reasonable to expect that they would have the same consequences for vulnerable young people who did not have specialized training to resist interrogation.”

-Nigel Barber, Ph.D., an evolutionary psychologist  https://www.history.com/news/what-happened-to-the-unabomber-at-harvard

 

"In his follow-up book, Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist (2003), Dr. Alston Chase, an alumnus of Harvard with a Princeton doctorate in philosophy, whose college and graduate school education and early professorial career paralleled that of Ted Kaczynski with whom he corresponded in 1998, provides further details about Murray’s assaultive experiment which deliberately undermined the student’s psychological well-being. He writes that after his article in The Atlantic, the Harvard files regarding Henry Murray’s experiments were “permanently removed” from the Murray Research Center (named in his honor). However, Dr. Chase had already examined these files in preparation for his book.

"The undergraduates were asked to write an autobiographical essay describing their most personal beliefs and aspirations, as well as their deepest sexual desires. They were taken individually to an interrogation room with a one-way mirror where they were strapped to a chair with electrodes attached to monitor their physiological responses. Each student was subjected to lengthy, abusive harangues by a law school student who had been given a detailed psychological battle plan by Murray. The students were deceived, ridiculed, and humiliated. In essence, students were put through a brutal “version of the third degree”, otherwise known as torture. Over the next three years, the volunteers were repeatedly humiliated, verbally assaulted and sexually debased. The entire proceeding was filmed from behind a one-way mirror, and each victim was required to relive his humiliation on film.

"Chase concludes that Kaczynski and his classmates unwittingly served not only Murray’s debased research methods but also his “sadism, sexual fantasies, desire for power, anger, need to explode and cause pain.” Dr. Murray’s own interpersonal dynamics included a predilection to sadism. His long-term (40-year) sadomasochistic love affair with Christiana Morgan, his colleague and co-inventor of the Thematic Apperception Test, is documented.

"Chase notes that many of the subjects in Murray’s experiments reported feelings of anger, nihilism, and alienation; and several remained haunted by the experience even 25 years later. He analyzes the Unabomber’s precepts and shows how these were an extension of his educational experience at Harvard. The mixture of brutal emasculation and ethical confusion that Dr. Kaczynski experienced at Harvard would have lifelong effects. Disillusioned with the scientific method, one lacking in ethical values and treated him as a guinea pig, coupled with his anger at his parents for pushing him into that vortex, generated a smoldering anger in Kaczynski which erupted in violence, ultimately turning him into the murderous vengeful “Unabomber.”"

https://ahrp.org/1959-1962-harvard-and-the-making-of-the-unabomber/

Edited June 15, 2023 by Jon Letendre

[InfraBeat]

2 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

I am simply incapable of believing that three years of torture sessions with a sadomasochist starting at age 16 can possibly not have played a role.

The claim that it played a role is a much weaker claim than your original claims that (1) The victims were agents of the program, and (2) Kaczinski targeted them for that reason and not for the reason he said himself.

You've given not a shred of evidence to support those claims. Instead, you give patently irrational arguments. 

(By the way, earlier I should have mentioned that likely the number of people targeted is far greater than the number of agents of the program, and Kaczyinski would have had to have access to each of their names to identify them as targets, which also is highly implausible.)

2 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

Disillusioned with the scientific method, one lacking in ethical values and treated him as a guinea pig, coupled with his anger at his parents for pushing him into that vortex, generated a smoldering anger in Kaczynski which erupted in violence, ultimately turning him into the murderous vengeful “Unabomber.”"

I will take it on faith that Alston's report of what he found in the files is accurate. Indeed, psychological torture. And I wouldn't argue against a view that such experiences wouldn't drive someone to profound mental illness. But again, it is one thing for the program to cause Kaczinski's mental illness that manifested in murder, but quite something else to claim that his victims were themselves agents of the program and that Kaczyinski targeted them for that reason. 

Your original claims are wild, unsupported, arbitrary, logic-defying, irrational bunk.  

Edited June 15, 2023 by InfraBeat

[InfraBeat]

Deleted by me.

Edited June 15, 2023 by InfraBeat

[InfraBeat]

5 hours ago, Reidy said:

If the experiment was the cause of K’s later behavior, wouldn’t we expect the same behavior from all or most or a significant portion of the other subjects?

No, that's a very poor inference.

[InfraBeat]

On 6/12/2023 at 11:11 PM, InfraBeat said:

On 6/12/2023 at 2:16 AM, Gus Van Horn blog said:

exemplified by the likes of Greta Thunberg

What is the basis for claiming that Thunberg is a follower of Kaczinski?

I'm still curious to know what is the basis for claiming that Thunberg is a follower of Kaczinski. 

[Jon Letendre]

5 hours ago, tadmjones said:

Like Manson or Jack Ruby?

Mob boss and serial murderer Whitey Bulger.

[Craig24]

8 hours ago, InfraBeat said:

I'm still curious to know what is the basis for claiming that Thunberg is a follower of Kaczinski. 

I'm confused.  Who is claiming Thunberg is a follower of Kaczinski?

[InfraBeat]

5 hours ago, Craig24 said:

Who is claiming Thunberg is a follower of Kaczinski?

The original poster in this thread. The claim is that not only is she a follower but that she exemplifies followers:

On 6/12/2023 at 2:16 AM, Gus Van Horn blog said:

These "acolytes," exemplified by the likes of Greta Thunberg

 

 

Edited June 15, 2023 by InfraBeat

[MisterSwig]

If Kaczynski had been targeting his MK Ultra torturers, don't you think the Feds would have identified him after two or three bombings? The clever murderers know not to target people with whom they have a past or present relationship.

Edited June 18, 2023 by MisterSwig

[Jon Letendre]

On 6/18/2023 at 5:51 PM, MisterSwig said:

If Kaczynski had been targeting his MK Ultra torturers, don't you think the Feds would have identified him after two or three bombings? The clever murderers know not to target people with whom they have a past or present relationship.

Perhaps they did identify him early, knew it was him doing it, pretended they had no idea who it could be or why, and simply couldn't find him.

[InfraBeat]

7 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

Perhaps

Perhaps anything you want to say "perhaps".

You've given no evidence, basis or even plausibility argument for your claim.